This is a thread over on the WINLINK group, but
all APRS users need to be reminded that APRS
is not just for mobiles. It was intended to provide
a standard for position parsing and map display of
ALL amateur radio assets on all frequencies where
stations ID with packet. Here is the post:
>>>bruninga at usna.edu 12/11/05 1:17 PM >>>
Ah, let me clarify the intent of my post:
True, but "APRS" is not a necessarily an end in itself, but a
standardized packet format for conveying standard items of
information of interest to the amateur comunity on *any*
frequency.
Thus, WinLINK, EchoLINK, IRLP, BBS's, and DX clusters
and just about any amateur radio resource that is going
to self identify on its own frequency is encouraged to
include its position & status into the standard APRS format
so that monitoring stations have a consistent resource for
viewing that info.
That was the original intent of APRS back in the early
1990's. Back then we had at least 30 packet frequencies
and it was an intended application to use APRS to monitor
a channel for say an hour and have a network map appear
before your eyes showing not only all the stations that you
can hear on that channel, but where they were, and their
PHG range circle showing their height and effectiveness.
APRS was designed as a fundamental monitoring tool for
beacons on any frequency. That is one of the reasons
it is so surprising to find that UIview ignores beacons
unless they have a posit in them. There is just so much
other info out there to monitor.
This need to encourage all amateur radio resources to
include their posit and PHG data in their beacons on any
and all frequenceis is a important today as it was back then.
In fact, there is a stated interest in the ARRL to have
all stations so identify, so that at times of disasters like
the hurricanes, that the amateur radio resources in an
area can quickly be assessed, just by monitoring the
channels and building the data base from the APRS
formatted info.
So to this end, we encourage all Winlink stations (the
topic of the original post) to include a parseable APRS
position and or status in their beacons.
And actually, as asked in the original post, the presence
or absence of a live-human operator can be included in
the APRS format too.
Hope that clarifys the intention of my post.
thanks
Bob, WB4APR